[bbales]

This is something I should have had years ago, but never got. I need something to clean up text -- for example, when cutting and pasting text from someone's web into a word processing document, so I can use it for research later on, I want to be able to take out all the formatting marks, so that it fits into the document as if I'd typed it there.

I went looking yesterday and even tried out a few. (IOne was TextSoap and the other was Apimac CleanText.") TextSoap didn't give me a good clue, as when I tried it out it kept telling me that the demo would only clean up 1K of text. The other worked quite well. It's a demo and costs $29, which is probably a little more than I was hoping to spend. On the other hand, people more than deserve to get paid for making my life easier, so I'm OK with it.

My question -- any other suggestions for low-cost solutions to this? This is something that people deal with on a daily basis, so there have to be other programs -- good ones -- out there. I did look at some others, but they seem to do more than what I need. I'm not making web sites, so I don't ahve to prepare text for that. And some of them seemed too heavy-duty, with a price tag to match.

Just wondering what people use.

[skybolt]

Are you using Word? In Microsoft Word, there is an option to "paste special" that will take out any formatting. Perhaps you could look for something like that? Not so familiar with many word processing apps, but this one will do what you want, and I would expect other packages have something similar.